Lichfield Road

Residential masterplan for 365 new homes on a complex town centre brownfield site, combining outline and full planning.

Stafford is a thriving market town with a strong sense of place and unique urban morphology. The site lies close to the town centre on a prominent arterial route; the A34 Lichfield Road. It has a long industrial heritage but is no longer suited to modern employment use, being an expansive, complex series of ageing structures built incrementally over time.

Comprehensive residential redevelopment represents the only viable future for the site, but also presents an exceptional opportunity to deliver large scale, comprehensive residential development adjacent to the town centre: sustainably located adjacent to myriad town centre services, transport connections and community infrastructure.

The design approach seeks to maximise this strategic opportunity; new family homes in the heart of the town, helping to reverse recent trends of continuous urban expansion and supporting the vitality of the centre.

OPEN led a large multi-disciplinary design team through a complex masterplanning process that established both outline development parameters and detailed first phase design. Balancing challenging aspects of access, landscape, drainage and infrastructure, the masterplan sets out a coherent plan for an attractive medium-density family neighbourhood set within a connected green infrastructure network.

Central to the masterplan is the concept of opening up new public links that benefit the wider community: transforming the site from a large, insular impenetrable industrial site to a place of permeable, flowing public streets and spaces.

The process involved close collaboration with the LPA through the pre-application process, undertaking design review through successive masterplan iterations to achieve consensus and ownership of key principles prior to submission of the application.

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